"Lonely Woman" by Ornette Coleman

The first time I heard this song, I was hopelessly lost. I had been
playing and listening to jazz music for years and knew its conventions
pretty well. This song, and most of Coleman's music, does not play by
the same rules as conventional jazz. But neither is it wacked-out,
atonal, free-form jazz. Its structure is close, but not identical, to
that of standard jazz, which is exactly why it's so fascinating.

The archetypal jazz track has a "head", a melody over well-defined
chord changes, at the beginning and end. In between, the chord
changes are repeated over and over while the musicians improvise.
This track is similar. There is a melody, but its structure is not as
clear and rigid as a typically Tin Pan Alley jazz standard.
Similarly, the chord changes are not clearly defined, but rather
implied by the melody itself. When the melody ends, Coleman
improvises briefly over accompaniment that again arises organically
from the melody, before the original melody returns. (In the standard
jazz parlance, he only takes one chorus.) But the "head" choruses
feel so improvisatory that the line between melody and improvisation,
between head and chorus, is really blurred.

Listening to this track still makes me feel slightly overwhelmed and
confused -- the way it felt to listen to jazz when I was first
learning about it.